Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat. Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
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We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
151–160 of 253 posts
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
More used to offer them than currently do. And the trend has been for sites that have RSS to remove it. So you're correct that RSS has not become extinct due to Google, it has merely contributed to lower adoption. Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the re…
It's pretty rare to find a news site that doesn't have an RSS feed today. I know because I've been collecting a long list of feeds.
I would say it's not rare at all. I collect a long list of RSS feeds too, and a lot of the time to figure out if there's an RSS feed, I have to install on an external plug-in, leave the site that I'm on and do a Google search to see if that same site has RSS, only to find it from an old tweet from 7 years ago, or an outdated web page that has links to RSS that amazingly still work. Or sometimes I view source and search for.rss or.xml. So the emphasis, visibility and discoverability has cratered. And the trend has been towards removing rather than adding.
It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.
Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#153This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team?
In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally.
(Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.)
[1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss
[2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog
[3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#154Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul
> We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died. > I needed our team to hit a deadline Why?
There's lots of reasons some of which I can't go into details about, but there are some that I can:
There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change)
The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#155To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!
For unofficial support, see https://hnrss.org
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#156RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.
Why? RSS can be monetized. It was monetized by Google before they killed Reader to force people to use Google+. Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
It can kind-of be monetized, but Google isn't just about monetization, it's about control. That's why we get stuff like AMP or more and more limiting version of Chrome pushed down our throats. RSS is way too open and difficult to control.
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#157RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with. AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it? Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.
This may be the most Poe's Law HN comment I have ever read. Bravo :-)
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#158Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul
> We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died. > I needed our team to hit a deadline Why?
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Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what's going on in the head of a person that decides to axe RSS support. "Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it. So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.” I think the bigger problem is people on the t…
> I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it.
All it would take is ?utm_source=rss, but betcha readers would start stripping that, because once you've started abusing everything, anything will look like abuse.
Re: We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
#160When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline o…
And since then, the other browsers have removed their native RSS/Atom feed support. Firefox and Safari both used to have it and have since removed it. Visiting an RSS feed in Safari now shows you a page that resembles a 404, telling you that Safari no longer supports feeds.
Yup. For firefox, having features that chrome doesn't, seems silly to them. It's not like they need market share or anything! Just remove fully functional, mature and feature complete code, cause why not?
No FTP, RSS, etc.